The 8-bit Z-80 processor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it is still used in embedded systems and TI graphing calculators. I had always assumed that the ALU (arithmetic-logic unit) in the Z-80 was 8 bits wide, like just about every other 8-bit processor. But while reverse-engineering the Z-80, I was shocked to discover the ALU is only 4 bits wide! The founders of Zilog mentioned the 4-bit ALU in a very interesting discussion at the Computer History Museum, so it's not exactly a secret, but it's not well-known either.

I have been reverse-engineering the Z-80 processor using images from the Visual 6502 team. The image below shows the overall structure of the Z-80 chip and the location of the ALU. The remainder of this article dives into the details of the ALU: its architecture, how it works, and exactly how it is implemented.

Ken Shirrif's blog is an absolute must for fans of ultra-low-level hardware stuff. This goes way over my head, but interesting nonetheless.

The architecture defines the width of a processor, not the internal design.

I alway thought the internal design was part of the architecture. And that the meaning of 8/16/32/64 bitness changed over the years with a little help by marketing. So the width of the processor is defined by the instruction set, not by the data path or registers or .. ?